There is not shortage of encryption software available. Unfortunately, many of these tools are overly complex, slow, and hard to automate. Obscuro is the solution.
What is it?
Obscuro is a set of command-line utilities that can encrypt and decrypt streams of data. It uses Libsodium‘s secretstream, which is a fantastic implementation of the XChaCha20 cipher.
Nice, where can I get it?
At https://jimmyhoke.net/software.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some questions I often get when I explain Obscuro to the voices in my head.
| Fantastic Question | Splendid Answer |
| How do I use it? | It comes with a manual called README. |
| Windows SmartScreen says it’s a virus! | SmartScreen is crap. It’s a reputation-based system so it just blocks everything that isn’t popular. If you’d like to see the source code it’s available to download. |
| Is it secure? | Dunno, I’m not a cryptographer. However, it uses Libsodium which is a very well-regarded encrytion library. |
| What is Oreveal and when should I use it? | Oreveal, like DeObscuro, will decrypt a file. The difference is that it decrypts the file in place. This is great if you don’t have enough disk space to accommodate both the encrypted and decrypted files. Since each chunk of the file is slightly larger after encryption, Oreveal can overwrite the file as it is decrypted. The downside of this is that if Oreveal is stopped for any reason, the file is permanently corrupted as it will have lost it’s header, which contains information needed to decrypt it. Never interrupt Oreveal or the file will be permanently LOST. |
| How fast is it? | Fast enough. Your drive speed will probably be the limiting factor. |
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